Happy National Hate Week! Today, we're all hating on Indiana. Who will be the left's Emmanuel Goldstein next week?

Evidently, the sole function of the media these days is to subject the public to a steady stream of manufactured events: "Hands Up, Don't Shoot"; nuclear power kills; Lena Dunham's rape by a college conservative at Oberlin; the "mattress girl" raped at Columbia University; Jon Stewart is funny; a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia; and a law protecting religious freedom will lead to separate water fountains for gays in Indiana.

The whole country has to keep being dragged through these liberal hate campaigns, but as soon as the precipitating event turns out to be a gigantic hoax, the truth is revealed like a bedtime story being read to a child: The ending is whispered and the narrator tiptoes out of the room.

Here's a time-saver: Whenever one of these conscience-shocking stories is promoted to front-page status by The New York Times and involves:

-- police brutality;

-- the environment;

-- a campus rape; or

-- gays;

... you can be pretty confident it's a hoax. As the saying goes, it didn't happen until it's reported by The New York Times, and not even then.

Many months, several million wasted taxpayer dollars and one cop's career later, even Eric Holder's Justice Department finally admitted that the whole "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" story was bunk.

After the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan four years ago, Bill Nye "the (self-proclaimed) Science Guy" gravely informed CNN viewers, "This is all bad and very scary. ... You know, it's nothing but danger. It's nothing but very serious, very, very long-term problems."

Wired magazine recently reported that, in the four years since the disaster, more than 96 percent of food, fish and agriculture throughout Fukushima has contained less than one-sixth of the radiation permitted in food imported to Europe.

Lena Dunham, star of HBO's "Girls," was forced to retract her autobiographical account of having been raped by a campus conservative named "Barry."

The alleged rapist of Columbia University's mattress girl finally released her alluring texts to him, and now we all know she was a desperate, spurned lover, not a rape victim.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely's much-celebrated Rolling Stone story about a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia turned out to be based on one poor, sad girl seeking attention by creating a fake online boyfriend and fantasizing her own gang-rape.

And this week, we all have to be in a panic about Indiana passing a measure that enshrines a basic principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, because of the utterly apocryphal assertion that the law will be used to turn gays away from restaurants.

The idea that generally applicable laws may, in certain circumstances, be required to accommodate individual religious beliefs has been around for centuries. That's why priests don't have to reveal penitents' confessions to the police and Quakers don't have to join the military.

Having won the war on gay marriage (by judicial fiat), now some liberal zealots insist on going house-to-house and shooting the survivors. They seem to seek out Christian businesses to provide floral arrangements and cakes for gay weddings so they can call the cops if the Christians try to pass.

A roomful of gays would say, "Why don't you guys just go to one of the nine out of 10 florists who would be happy to have your business?" (My guess is, if the zealots looked really hard, they might even be able to find a gay florist!)

That is all the religious freedom laws do: Encourage steely-eyed activists to stop requiring every last Christian to celebrate gay marriages.

Right now, in states that don't have religious protection laws, Christians are being compelled, by general non-discrimination laws, either to participate in gay marriages -- or go out of business.

With the law, the Christian gets a legal argument. He might win in court or he might lose, but he'd at least have an argument, thus encouraging the kill-the-survivors nuts to go to another shop for their gay weddings and stop doing their victory dances on top of Christians.

It's utter nonsense that any shopkeeper, least of all a nice Christian, would turn away a customer for any reason other than a deeply held religious belief, such as not wanting to participate in a gay wedding, a Planned Parenthood gala or any event involving Bill Clinton.

Do not assume that because liberals are in an absolute panic over Indiana's law, they must have a point. To the contrary, the more hysterical they are, the more you should assume the whole story is a sham.

When the journalist Richard Bradley raised questions about Erdely's Rolling Stone gang-rape story, Anna Merlan responded at Jezebel, calling his questions a "giant ball of sh*t," in an article titled "'Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?' Asks Idiot."

Even after Rolling Stone had retracted the story and Charlottesville chief of police Timothy J. Longo confirmed that the man Jackie accused of precipitating the gang-rape didn't exist, his department merely "suspended" the investigation. I'm going to call Chief Longo with a complaint that I was raped by a unicorn to see if we can get him to actually "close" a case.

It's one thing to treat disturbed girls falsely crying rape with kid gloves. (Though the boyfriend of the Duke lacrosse false-rape accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, might have wished she'd been held a little more accountable: Mangum was never prosecuted for her lies and she later murdered her boyfriend, thus dashing her hopes for a primetime show on MSNBC.)

But why do we have to treat liberal fantasists in the media as if they're children, too? Believing there's a monster under the bed is cute. Falsely accusing cops of murder, men of rape and an entire state of homophobia is not.

Every single cause championed by liberals is based on a fake story. They make up events that didn't happen and get apoplectic over things that never will happen. The definition of "liberal" is quickly becoming: people who believe their fantasies should be facts.